Dorothy Hodgkin

Crystallographer who established the structure of penicillin during the war, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry in 1964. Born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, the daughter of a British archaeologist. She read chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and then worked under John Bernal at Cambridge, where she learned X-ray crystallography — the method by which the diffraction of X-rays through a crystal is used to reconstruct the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. From 1934 she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, which progressively deformed her hands and made handling apparatus increasingly difficult. She worked on regardless, for the rest of her life. Between 1941 and 1945, with Barbara Low and other colleagues, she determined the structure of penicillin. The problem had direct military weight: mass production of the antibiotic required knowing how it was built, and the beta-lactam structure she proposed contradicted the view of the leading organic chemists of the day. She was right. Penicillin saved very large numbers of Allied wounded, and its industrial manufacture rested on this work. She later established the structure of vitamin B12, the work for which she received the Nobel Prize, and in 1969 that of insulin, which had occupied her for thirty-four years. She remains the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences, and was appointed to the Order of Merit. She died on 29 July 1994.